"I understand one thing, Honora, that you're too confoundedly clever for
me," he declared.

Honora did not reply. For at that moment they drew up at a carpet
stretched across the pavement.

Unlike the mansions of vast and imposing facades that were beginning
everywhere to catch the eye on Fifth Avenue, and that followed mostly the
continental styles of architecture, the house of the Cecil Graingers had
a substantial, "middle of-the-eighties" appearance. It stood on a corner,
with a high iron fence protecting the area around it. Within, it gave one
an idea of space that the exterior strangely belied; and it was
furnished, not in a French, but in what might be called a comfortably
English, manner. It was filled, Honora saw, with handsome and priceless
things which did not immediately and aggressively strike the eye, but
which somehow gave the impression of having always been there. What
struck her, as she sat in the little withdrawing room while the maid
removed her overshoes, was the note of permanence.

Some of those who were present at Mrs. Grainger's that evening remember
her entrance into the drawing-room. Her gown, the colour of a rose-tinted
cloud, set off the exceeding whiteness of her neck and arms and vied with
the crimson in her cheeks, and the single glistening string of pearls
about the slender column of her neck served as a contrast to the shadowy
masses of her hair. Mr. Reginald Farwell, who was there, afterwards
declared that she seemed to have stepped out of the gentle landscape of
an old painting. She stood, indeed, hesitating for a moment in the
doorway, her eyes softly alight, in the very pose of expectancy that such
a picture suggested.